


"The Woman That Fell From the Sky" Ficlets & Headcanons

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Music, Angst and Feels, F/M, Family Feels, Ficlet Collection, Inspired by Music, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-03 17:18:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11536821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: Since I wrote "The Woman That Fell From the Sky" in May 2015, I get more asks about it on Tumblr than anything else I've ever written.  What happens after Raven's story gets published?  Do they ever get married?  Do they talk about Jake?  What happened after Marcus showed up at her doorstep in Connecticut?  I've answered a number of asks and prompts about it, some of which turned into ficlets of their own, so for those not on Tumblr who might be interested in more of this universe, I've gathered them here.





	1. FICLET: Kane and Abby's First Night Together

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Woman That Fell From the Sky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3936322) by [ChancellorGriffin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin). 

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **PROMPT: what are your sexy headcanons for the woman that fell from the sky? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anon: “sex please”  
> me: “okay fine but first five pages of angst about 9/11″

The first time it happens is in the shower.

The news is blaring on the TV in Abby’s bedroom and she hasn’t been able to turn it off all day.  Clarke is still at school; her teacher called around 10 a.m., her voice flat and numb, to tell Abby she’s free to come pick up Clarke any time or leave her there for regular school hours.  They opted not to tell the students the news and leave it to their parents to have those discussions at home.  Abby is on her way to get Clarke when Marcus arrives. 

Once the first shock of seeing each other again, of relief that he’s alive, wears off, two things immediately occur to her. 

First, that Marcus is about to fall apart.  He has ash in his hair and on his clothes, which makes them both feel a little sick; he’s pale and trembling and Abby can see him begin to crumble as the adrenaline begins to wear off.  (He must have driven ninety miles an hour to get there.) 

And second, that seeing Uncle Marcus so shaken when she’s never seen him anything but warm and strong and kind would traumatize Clarke more than her limited six-year-old understanding of what was happening in New York possibly could.

She strips him down to his boxers, right there in the front hallway, and sends him upstairs with clean towels while she throws everything he brought with him into the laundry and goes to telephone the school to speak to Clarke.

“Uncle Marcus is here to stay with us for a little while,” she says, as brightly as she can.  “I’ll come get you from day care at six, okay?”

“Uncle Marcus, Uncle Marcus!” exclaims Clarke with a wild delight that makes a lump rise in Abby’s throat.  “Hooray!”

“He’s excited to see you too, baby,” she says, swallowing back tears.  “Now go on back to class and we’ll see you tonight.”

“We’re watching _Cinderella_ ,” says Clarke happily.  “We get movies all day!  Is it a special day?”

“I’ll see you when you get home,” says Abby after she can finally form words again, and Clarke hangs up.

Abby’s sitting on the bed, staring at the footage of the crumbling World Trade Center towers over and over and over again, listening to the water running in the shower when it occurs to her that Marcus has been in there for a long time.

The master bathroom doesn’t lock, and she looks from the TV to the door and back again several times before tentatively reaching for the doorknob.  “Marcus?” she says quietly, and he doesn’t answer.  She doesn’t want to push this, doesn’t want to violate his privacy this way, but it’s been an hour and what was a mild sense of worry forty minutes ago has turned to real fright.

He doesn’t answer, so she takes a deep breath and pushes open the door.

He’s naked and shivering on the floor of the big marble walk-in shower, steaming hot water pouring down on him and flattening his hair against his skull, and he’s _sobbing._

She says his name three times.  He doesn’t look up.  His knees are drawn up to his chin, head buried in his arms, like a frightened child, and he doesn’t hear or see her.

Marcus Kane has New York in his blood.  He’s never lived anywhere else.  He’s a snob about pizza and complains about tourists and when the Yankees are losing he’s unbearable and every time he flies home and the plane circles the harbor where you can see the Statue of Liberty his heart starts to beat a little faster, but his city is on fire and he still has at least a dozen friends unaccounted for who work in Lower Manhattan and reality is sinking in.  He can’t stop crying, his whole body is shaking, wracked with sobs, and so Abby does the only thing she can think of to do.

She opens the glass door and walks inside, without even stopping to get undressed, and sinks down beside him to take him in her arms.

There’s nothing to say, so they don’t say anything.  Water streams through Abby’s hair and soaks her green jersey dress until it clings to her like a second skin, but she doesn’t even notice.  She holds the trembling man in her arms and strokes his back up and down until he stops shaking and his breathing begins to grow smooth and even again.

“It feels so wrong to be happy on a day like this,” she murmurs, kissing his warm wet hair, “but it still feels like a miracle that you’re here.”  He looks up at her, and sees she’s crying too, and that’s the first moment he realizes how terrified she was - until the moment she opened her front door and saw him standing there - that she had lost him.

“Our city is burning,” he whispers.

“We’ll rebuild,” she tells him, her hands cupping his jaw as she presses a kiss against his forehead.   “We always do.”  She kisses him again.  “Nobody in the fucking world is as tough as our people are,” she says firmly.  “We’re New Yorkers.  And New Yorkers survive.”  She kisses him again, longer this time.  It’s harder to pull away.  She leans her forehead against his, her wet hair trailing like a waterfall over his bare back.  “You, me, Clarke, Vera,” she says softly.  “We’re alive.  Your whole family is alive.”

“Family?” he repeats as though the word doesn’t mean anything to him, and the tears flowing from her eyes mingle with the warm water streaming down her face as she kisses him again and again.

“I’m in love with you, Marcus,” she says to him.  “Of course you’re my family.”

“I love you too,” he says back to her, his voice raw and hoarse.  “I always have.”

This time the kiss is different.  It’s not comfort he needs from her now – or rather, not the kind she was giving before.  Her mouth is hot and soft on his and her hands gliding wetly up and down his back are stirring him more than they’re soothing him and the realization hits them both at the same time.

Abby rises to her knees and pulls the sodden cotton dress off her body, wrings it out and tosses it onto the bathroom floor.  Marcus looks up, awestruck, at the expanse of bare skin beneath the white bra and panties that are soaked to transparency, and as she pulls them off too he’s almost too stunned to move.  She rises to her feet, holds out her hand, and pulls him up to join her, and gets her first look at his body.  Water pours down a solid bare chest thatched with dark hair and streams over muscular hips and thighs to the ground, and she knows she’s staring but she can’t tear her eyes away.  But he’s staring too, eyes roaming over the soft white breasts and long dancer’s legs that he’s never seen bared like this before.

For a long time, they just look.  Everything is astonishing and new.  Everything is happening to them for the first time.  They held themselves in check for years, they pressed all hints of such feelings far, far away, but now they’re here and they’re together and the sweetly-scented steam of the hot shower swirls around them and makes them feel soft and languid and the world recedes far away as Marcus suddenly, startlingly, seizes Abby in his arms, backing her up against the cool marble wall, and begins to kiss her like nobody has kissed her in a very, very long time.

Their bodies have been waiting for years to do this, and they’re ready for each other very nearly right away.  Marcus lowers his head to trail soft kisses up and down Abby’s warm wet skin as his hand glides down her stomach.  “Is this okay?” he asks, and she nods breathlessly, her arms tightening around his back.  His fingers reach in to stroke her lightly, the sensation of such an intimate touch making his hands tremble a little – it’s so _much_ , it’s so overwhelming, the feeling of being permitted to be so close to her after all this time.

_“Oh,”_ she exclaims, eyes wide and stunned as his hand begins to move inside her, and then she smiles at him, and Marcus is lost.

He asks first, before everything, and she says nothing but _yes_.   _Yes_ to his fingers shifting deeper inside her, startling a sharp little gasp out of her lungs.   _Yes_ to him stooping down low enough to take first one breast, then the other, softly inside his mouth.   _Yes_ to his hands all over her body, roaming hungrily, learning all her curves, touching everything with astonished, grateful wonder.  And _yes, yes, yes_ when he palms her soft hips and presses her back against the wall as she opens herself up and takes him inside her.

For a long, long moment, she just holds him there, her hands cradling his face, her lips parted, steam rising off her white skin.  “Marcus,” she whispers.

“Abby,” he says back, and there’s nothing else to say because everything that matters is contained in those two words.  Her hands slide up his strong arms to encircle his neck, while his own make their way down lower to grasp her thighs and hold her close as she wraps her legs around his waist.  He lifts her like she weighs nothing at all, burying his mouth in the soft hollow of her shoulder.

And then they begin.

It’s slow at first, a little hesitant.  He’s big, but he’s gentle, afraid to hurt her, afraid to push her farther than she’s ready to go.  And they’re both strangely, unexpectedly shy, the ghost of Jake Griffin hovering between them.  Abby has slept with nobody but Jake for so long that she’s self-conscious about what Marcus is feeling, about how much more experienced he is than her, about whether it feels as good for him as she wants it to.  Meanwhile, Marcus – well aware that Jake and Abby’s many years together gave them an ease and comfort with each other’s bodies that he doesn’t have yet – is learning Abby from scratch, with no idea yet what she likes or wants.  There’s an endearing clumsiness to it at first, clutching each other tightly, fingers digging into skin, bumping noses as they reach for eager kisses.  His thrusts are smooth and shallow at first, while they get used to each other, but as he feels Abby melt in his arms, their bodies fusing together under the steaming hot shower, her breath coming in light little gasps, he grows a little bolder, bit by bit, and then suddenly … there it is.

They’ve clicked.

They’ve found it.

_“Oh,”_ she murmurs again, in that same heart-stopping tone of delighted surprise, and from that point on it’s as effortless as though they’ve been sharing a bed for twenty years.

Things begin to move faster, harder, deeper, as their pulses begin to quicken and their breathing grow more hoarse and desperate.  Abby leans her forehead against his, her arms and legs wrapped tightly around him to pull him as deeply inside her as she can, and the angle it gives them once Marcus begins to let go does startling, extraordinary things to them both.

His eyes are closed as he moves inside her and she can’t help smiling through her soft, fluttering gasps.  “You have such beautiful eyelashes,” she can’t stop herself from saying, and his eyes fly back open to fix her with an amused, perplexed stare.

“What a weird thing to notice at a moment like this,” he says, and she realizes as he says it that he’s right, and then suddenly they’re both laughing.  She buries her face in his shoulder, shoulders trembling with giggles as he holds her tight and she feels his arms around her shake with his own low, throaty chuckle.  They laugh and laugh, and there are tears mixed in with it too, it’s some astonishing explosion of emotion rising up inside both of them that contains every single feeling in the world inside it, and all they can do is let it wash over them and land wherever it will.

When Marcus feels Abby begin to near the edge, he grips her tightly in impossibly strong arms, holding her close so she knows she can let go, that he won’t let her fall.  She comes with a great shuddering cry, and he follows her over the cliff just a moment later, panting and sighing as he bursts inside her and then seizes her mouth in his with a grateful, desperate kiss.

She stays with him under the hot water, her hands gentle and soothing against his scalp, his chest, his back, as the rich sweet scent of lavender lathers away all traces of the dust of New York City, and when he steps out onto the cold tile floor he feels clean and warm and alive, and he remembers the thing Abby said to him.

_“We’re New Yorkers.  And New Yorkers survive.”_

“I’m going to go put my clothes in the dryer,” he tells her.  “I’ll be all right now.”

“Marcus –“

“I’ll be all right now,” he reassures, kissing her forehead.  “I promise.  Go get Clarke.”

* * *

It’s good even the very first time, but it just gets better after that.

He stays and stays and stays.  As they grow more used to each other, as they begin to put the pieces of life back together, as Clarke accustoms herself comfortably and easily to Uncle Marcus being present every day, they begin to feel more like a couple.  Like a family.  By the time he returns to New York a few months later, they’ve made love so many times that the shyness, the uncertainty, is gone altogether.  Marcus never loses that slightly dazed sense of wonder the first time he enters her, like he can’t believe he’s this lucky, like he’s not sure it’s real.  For the first few weeks, he’s still timid with her, asking permission before every touch, before he lets himself inside her.  She loves him for that, for that poignant, uncertain vulnerability.  But she loves him for the new side of him that begins to emerge, too, the Marcus Kane who can’t keep his hands off her, who makes her feel desired in a way that is completely new.

He loves her, yes.  But he also _wants_ her very, very badly.

All the time.

It’s not just at night, when they lie in bed and she reaches for him to pull his warm strong body on top of hers, stifling her cries in his shoulder to keep from waking up Clarke when he makes her come.  It’s mornings too, as he presses a sleepy smiling mouth against hers and rolls over on top of her while she laughs and pulls him close.  Or afternoons, even, when Abby comes home for a few hours to eat and nap between shifts in the middle of the day, and Marcus eases her into a deep, contented sleep by spending a long, long time kneeling between her thighs with his mouth buried deep inside her, stroking her trembling thighs with soothing hands and bringing her to climax after climax until her entire body is soft and boneless and limp, and she falls asleep in his arms.

And as they grow more at ease with each other, as the fact of Marcus’ presence in her home become less disorienting, Abby becomes more comfortable initiating, asking for what she wants.  She gets bolder, more adventurous, and the first time they make love at night while Clarke is away at a sleepover Marcus realizes something he didn’t know about her.

Abby makes a _lot_ of noise.

With a child in the house, of course, she can’t.  She muffles her moans and gasps in his chest and bites her lip to keep from screaming and clenches the sheets in her fists.  And it’s habit, she does it even at ten in the morning when they’re alone in the house after Clarke has gone to school.  But the first night they’re alone, he sees her tense up to swallow back the sound and he whispers “you don’t have to do that, Abby,” stroking all the tension out of her shoulders and arms and throat and jaw, pressing kisses all over her, and something inside her releases and suddenly she’s _frantic_ and he’s never experienced anything so desperately erotic in his life.

She has a thousand different sounds, and over the years he learns them all.

Marcus likes it best with his back against the comfortably padded headboard, Abby seated on his lap, her forehead bent close to his as her hair brushes over his shoulder.  Sometimes they kiss, lightly, gently.  Sometimes they just look at each other.  Abby likes it best when he gets her ready with his mouth – he’s an astonishingly generous lover, she learns, he would go down on her for an hour at a time if she let him – and then kisses his way back up her body to pin her beneath him with strong, warm arms.  She likes the feeling of his body as a wall between her and the world.  But there’s no way that doesn’t feel good, there’s no way they don’t like it, and the vertiginous sensation of falling further and further in love with each other with every touch doesn’t fade away.

It’s being far away that turns out to be the hard part.  Once their bodies have gotten used to each other, going back to sleeping alone is excruciating.  They suffer in silence for weeks, months at a time, alone in their separate homes, three hours away from each other, in beds that feel too big and cold and empty now.

They fall into phone sex almost by accident.

It was Marcus Kane’s voice she fell in love with first, that night on the stage where she first heard him sing, so it’s hardly a surprise that Marcus Kane’s voice remains her weakness forever.  When he murmurs to her in bed, when he sighs her name as she takes him in her mouth, when he bends close to her ear to tell her how good it feels to be inside her, it’s like time stops moving and the world disappears.  The first time he talks dirty to her in bed, she’s shocked into blushing but comes harder than she’s ever come before.  So it’s a natural evolution from that to huddling underneath the covers of her bed with her cell phone and as many blankets muffling her as possible, gently stroking herself while Marcus whispers things to her in the dark and her soft, breathy little cries stimulate him, in turn.

It’s not enough, but it’s something.

They’re not wild, particularly, but they don’t need to be.  Nothing grows stale over the passing decades, as time passes, as Clarke grows up.  They’re not one of those middle-aged couples who needs to spice up their love life with blindfolds or spankings.  They like things simple.  They’ve been through so much, suffered so much, that they never take each other for granted.  Just the pure joy of being with each other is enough.  And they never run out of things to discover. 

They’ve been together for nearly three years, for example, before Abby discovers how much Marcus loves dancing. 

He’s moved her television out of their bedroom and replaced it with a turntable like the one in the living room downstairs, and one night she steps out of the bathroom, toweling off her damp hair, clad in the white cotton slip she wears to bed when it’s hot outside, and sees him standing shirtless in his pajama pants putting on a record.

“Dance with me,” he says, startling her.

“Marcus, it’s eleven o’clock at night.  On a Tuesday.”

“Dance with me,” he says again, holding out his hands, and so she switches off the light, and she does.

The moon shines in through the open window, letting the hot summer night breeze in as Marcus pulls her close, one hand on her back and one on her waist, and that’s when she discovers that he’s the best dancer she’s ever known in her life.  It’s like being weightless, dancing with Marcus, it’s warm and sweet and smooth and he leads her without faltering and she rests her head on his bare chest and feels herself dissolve into him.

Marcus can’t listen to music he loves without singing, so she hears his soft rich voice murmur along with Eric Clapton’s, sending shivers down her spine.

_“I feel wonderful because I see_  
The love light in your eyes.  
And the wonder of it all  
Is that you just don’t realize  
How much I love you … “

They dance for a long time, long after the music has stopped.  When they climb into bed, and Marcus sinks down on top of her, pressing soft hungry kisses against her hair, slipping deeply inside her, his body rising and falling as he gasps her name over and over, both of them can still hear the music.


	2. Headcanons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **PROMPT: Could you pretty please with a Kabby kiss on top someday do a list of headcanons (if you have any, that is) for _The Woman That Fell From The Sky_? That story is tied for my favorite with _The Life You Make In Ruins_ and there's so much we don't know about Marcus and Abby's life during all those years they were together and just AHHH IT MAKES ME SO EMOTIONAL.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I crowdsourced this ask to @victorias and @convenientmisfires, to see if there were any particular things they'd always wanted to know, and they co-created this list of questions for me to answer.

_**Do Raven and Clarke eventually become friends?**_ Not for a long time.  Clarke is super protective of her mom, and life is miserable for Abby for a long time after the story comes out, and Clarke blames Raven for it.  But Marcus becomes friends with Raven, and eventually Clarke and even Abby come around. _ **  
**_

_**Where does Marcus compose?  What is his process like?**_ He has a studio but he never uses it.  In New York, he writes in coffee shops.  (New York is a great city to live in if you’re a celebrity because New Yorkers pride themselves on appearing to not give a fuck about running into celebrities; so if you can keep yourself out of the line of fire with tourists, you can do pretty well.  There’s a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop near his apartment where he plays surprise acoustic sets sometimes, and will always happily sign autographs on his way in or out, in exchange for a tacit unspoken agreement with the hipster baristas that if it looks like he’s there to write, they’ll leave him in peace.  It works pretty well.  Every once in awhile, some pack of teenage girls who read on the internet that Marcus Kane sometimes hangs out here will descend en masse to stalk him, but the staff and the regulars are surprisingly protective.  “I think you’re looking for the Starbucks on the other end of the block,” they’ll say, and let the man in the knit cap and chunky glasses hiding in the back corner behind the wood pillar continue scribbling in his notepad in peace. _ **  
**_

_**Do they ever get to go out, like on dates, before the secret comes out?  Or is it just him showing up at her home every now and then?  And did she ever go to his place?**_ She never went to his place.  Her tiny little Connecticut town is aggressively protective of her, because they love her so much, so everyone who lives there keeps her secret.  They go out a lot when he’s there.  He’s the silent partner in a local wine bar and he’s donated a lot of money (quietly) to town restoration projects, so he’s very popular with the locals, and they go out a lot around town.  Marcus likes it there because everyone in Abby’s town treats him like a regular person.  They all know he’s MARCUS KANE, MEGASTAR, but they treat him like “Marcus Kane, Dr. Griffin’s nice out-of-town boyfriend who’s visiting again for the Labor Day festival,” and he hasn’t had that in a long time. _ **  
**_

_**After the news came out, did Abby ever attend an event with him officially?**_ The Grammys, once.  She hated it.  The red carpet was overwhelming, everyone screaming at her and flashbulbs snapping.  She looked great - City of Light Records set her up with a stylist and she got a custom emerald green Marchesa - but she was miserable.  After that, they both agreed it would be more fun for everyone if he took Clarke instead. _**  
**_

_**Does Raven’s secret Kane blog on Tumblr have a lot of followers?**_ 1.25 million but NOBODY’S SUPPOSED TO KNOW ABOUT THAT BLOG and if anyone asks, Raven’s never heard of it.

 _ **What was that first night like when Abby found out they’d been outed?**_ Clarke called her the second she walked out of the radio station and told her everything, and then called Marcus.  She was distraught and crying and profusely apologetic, but both Abby and Marcus told her not to worry about it.  She offered to come home from school, but she had a bio midterm the next day and Abby told her not to.  Marcus came, though; he drove out that afternoon with a publicist from City of Light Records who sat Abby down in the living room and patiently explained to her that this was the end of her anonymity and any semblance of an ordinary life, and recommended they call the college radio station and try to shut this down to keep Jasper Jordan from posting the story.  But Abby wouldn’t do it.  She told the publicist that she wouldn’t do anything that would make Clarke feel like she’d done something wrong.  “Clarke didn’t say anything that wasn’t true,” she said.  “She just told her own story.  I can’t stop her from doing that.”  The publicist told her “You will never be able to go out in public unrecognized again.”  Abby laughed at that.  She was like “I think you’re overestimating how much interest people will have in a small-town Connecticut doctor.”

The publicist was right. Abby was wrong. _ **  
**_

_**Has he ever hurt himself and has she fixed it?**_ She usually makes him go see his own doctor when something really major happens, but there was the time he was on a really old ladder trying to clean her gutters - he doesn’t actually know how to clean gutters but it’s the kind of thing that all the husbands in this town do and he wants to be a good small-town citizen so he figures, you know, how hard can it be - but it’s clogged with leaves and the old broom handle he’s using to try and shove the leaves out snaps and he loses his balance and falls on the lawn.  Once Abby ascertains that he hasn’t broken his back or cracked his skull or caused any serious damage, and she doesn’t need to call an ambulance, she hauls him inside to treat his sprained ankle with ice and an extremely stern lecture.  (They hire a guy to deal with the gutters after that.) _ **  
**_

_**What’s their go-to family movie?**_ You did NOT hear this from me, but Marcus Kane loves _Mary Poppins._ (There’s a huge Halloween festival in their town every year, all the kids trick-or-treating in the houses around the town square while the adults sit on the porch and drink hot cider and hand out caramel apples.  The one and only time Marcus and Abby have won - it’s a pretty heated competition, Diana Sydney next door is their nemesis because she’s won six times in a row - they went as Mary Poppins and Bert in their “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” costumes.  Clarke went as Mrs. Banks, whichled to at least three weeks of Marcus torturing her by replacing “thank you” with “well done, sister suffragette!”)

 _ **Was Clarke home over 9/11?  Did Marcus and Abby get out of bed/put on clothes at any point on the 12th?**_ Marcus and Abby didn’t get out of bed for most of the day, but it wasn’t all sex; some of it was just laying in bed and holding each other and watching the news and crying. Marcus was the one who answered the door when Clarke got home and he flung his arms around her and kissed the top of her head and pulled her inside.  They spent the next week huddled together on the couch in their pajamas watching the news, calling around everyone they knew to make sure their friends were all safe. Marcus made a playlist of songs about New York and for months that’s all they could listen to.  It starts with [Billy Joel singing the National Anthem at Yankee Stadium](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DlQkXdRKMB9c%26list%3DPL7yzAAp3V3yOUkKPrj0vU-POdq8ygGc3j%26index%3D2&t=ZDhkNzI4NWE0ZmExMjhhOGEyZTdiYjU0NjVkZWRjZWQwMDMyMGUzZSxOU29jek5HaQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AQm03XPNOy64-pKxUxcMBuQ&p=http%3A%2F%2Fkane-and-griffin.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F145188820096%2Fcould-you-pretty-please-with-a-kabby-kiss-on-top&m=1).

_**_**Tell me little intimate things about them like which side of the bed they sleep on and how they sleep and what things he leaves at her house all the time like he belongs there even when he’s gone.** _ ** _

Marcus snores. 

This is his most closely-guarded secret.  It is impossible to seem cool if people know that you snore.  But he does.  It’s not an obnoxious sound, Abby actually finds it soothing, this low soft whuffling kind of sound like a content dog makes. But it’s a definite snore.  She would never tell anyone, though.  She likes that she knows this thing about him that nobody else knows.  She sleeps on the right side of the bed, because she’s right-handed; Marcus is left-handed, and it’s easier for him to reach his book and tea on the bedside table if he’s on that side.  It works out nicely.  (Jake was right-handed too, and was forever reaching out clumsily with the wrong arm and knocking over alarm clocks.)  _**  
**_

The first night Marcus slept over, he had nothing with him but an overnight bag, and he stayed for months.  He stayed so long that he ran out of the tiny travel toothpaste he had brought with him and finally just went to the store and bought a full-sized tube of the regular kind he always used.  Then he got tired of using a travel razor.  Then he got tired of only having one change of clothes.  Pretty soon there was a shelf in the bathroom medicine cabinet and two drawers in the guest room dresser that belonged to him.

He took all the things with him when he went back to New York to work, and then brought them all with him again the next time he came to visit, and so on, and so forth.  He tired very quickly of living out of suitcases, but he was also wary of disrupting Clarke and Abby’s life any more than he already had by staking a claim to space that wasn’t his.  It was Clarke, finally, at the age of 16, who asked him point-blank why he didn’t just leave his stuff there instead of carrying it back and forth all the time.  This felt to Marcus like permission from Clarke to make his place in the family a little more permanent.  So from that point on, Abby’s closet, the bathroom cupboards, even the DVD collection and pantry began to absorb a little more Marcus Kane.  A turntable appeared one day, along with some blues records.  Marcus would call Abby in the middle of the day wondering if he’d left the book he was reading on the dining room table.  A truly unnecessary variety of hot sauces appeared in the spice cupboard and never left.  It was always still Abby Griffin’s house - it didn’t, at first blush, look like a house where a man lived - but after a few years, he didn’t need a suitcase anymore.  Everything he needed was already there.  
****

_**Does Abby sing along with his songs while he’s writing?  Do they harmonize well?**_ Marcus loves Abby’s singing voice.  Abby doesn’t.  She’s embarrassed when he catches her singing around the house.  But every once in awhile, when he’s stumped on a song, he’ll come home and hear Abby humming along to it in the kitchen while she’s making dinner and she’ll be humming it just a little bit differently than the way he sang it to her that morning - half a key lower, or a G-sharp in that one spot in the middle of the bridge instead of a G-natural - and that unlocks the whole thing.  _**  
**_

_**What is Marcus’ embarrassing musical secret?  Who does he secretly jam to?**_ “Talk Dirty To Me” by Poison. _ **  
**_

_**Do they talk about Jake?**_ All the time. They both miss him, and they want Clarke to have stories about him to hold onto, since she was so little when she died she hardly remembers anything.  Marcus makes it easy on both of them, to make sure they both know that he respects the place Jake will always have in their life.  One summer, Vera’s cleaning out her attic and finds a whole trunk full of Marcus’ childhood stuff, and sends him boxes and boxes of old childhood photos, including tons that include Jake.  After that, every Father’s Day he frames a new one for Clarke and tells her the story.  (“Okay, so this is on 4th of July when we were eight, there was a water balloon fight that went south after my mom’s cat got involved …”)  And they always have family dinner together on Jake’s birthday.

Years later, when Clarke gets married, Marcus is the one who walks her down the aisle.  (Raven Reyes from _Vanity Fair_ is the only journalist given press credentials to cover the wedding.)

At the reception, he gives the father-of-the-bride toast and talks about how proud Jake would be of the woman his daughter has become, how grateful Marcus is to have her in his life, and how she’s changed him.  Then, for the couple’s first dance (IMAGINE YOUR OTP, I DON’T CARE WHO CLARKE MARRIES IN THIS SCENARIO) Marcus plays a brand-new song he wrote about holding onto love whenever you find it.  It’s called “Let’s Call It Hope.”  The song ends up getting him 10 million iTunes downloads and a Grammy, but whenever people bring it up he shrugs and says that while he’s proud of the studio cut, the best that song ever sounded was just him and his guitar on the day his stepdaughter got married.


	3. FICLET: For Auld Lang Syne, My Dear

**New Year’s Day, 2017  
Massachusetts**

I’m not a writer.

I just want to say that right off the top because if this is a mess, you should know none of it was my idea.

I was the first person Raven called when she found out about the book deal, and she asked if I wanted to write a chapter.  I said I wasn’t sure.  “You’re gonna call it ‘The Girl Inside the Mountain,’ aren’t you?” I asked her.  She didn’t say yes but she didn’t say no.  But she probably will.

The thing is Raven’s kind of my friend now – Marcus really likes her, and I like her a lot too, and even Mom is starting to thaw out a little bit; though you can hardly blame her for having kind of a hard time given how all of this started.  But anyway, she’s my friend, and the book is a big deal for her; Marcus said he wouldn’t authorize a biography from anybody else, and I know he got City of Light to lean on the publisher a little.  They were gonna give the deal to some old white dude who writes for the _New Yorker_ and just finished a book on Mick Jagger I guess, and they thought Raven didn’t have enough “mainstream credibility” to be taken seriously.  She gets that a lot, it sounds like.  People treating her big scoop like a fluke, just because she knows Jasper and Jasper knows me and I said what I said on that campus radio show.  It pisses me off.  You _know_ it’s just because she’s a girl.  It pisses Marcus off too, but for different reasons; I think he gets mad when people don’t take Raven’s music brain seriously.  She was the right person to write that story, if anybody was.  If somebody was going to write about my mom, it should have been Raven.  Nobody else got it.  Nobody else ever listened to his songs and heard what she heard.  That _New Yorker_ guy sure as hell didn’t.

Sorry to whichever editor gets stuck with my chapter.  I don’t know how to write a rock star autobiography – they don’t teach you that in pre-med, unfortunately – so I’m not really sure what I’m doing.  This is kind of rambly already.  I’m not sure what to write.

Raven says I should tell you a story about Marcus and my mom, one that you haven’t heard before.  Do you know about the two New Year’s Eve concerts that got snowed out?  It’s New Year’s while I’m writing this, that’s what made me think of it.  You probably know about the second one, since it was just like a year ago, but unless you live in our little town, you don’t know about the first one.

I remember that New Year’s really clearly, even though it was years ago, because there were a lot of things about the relationship between Marcus and my mom that first began to make sense to me then.  I was so little when my dad died and we left New York, and I was so little when the Twin Towers fell and Marcus drove out to make sure we were okay and then stayed.  When you’re a kid, you just get used to whatever you’re used to.  I was used to having no dad, having a mom all the time, and occasionally – at unpredictable intervals and for varying lengths of time – having a Marcus.

One time my mom got called into an emergency surgery the day Marcus was driving back to the city, so he dropped me off at Bellamy and Octavia’s house to play until she was off work.  “Who’s that guy?” Bellamy asked me, puzzled.  “Is that your dad?”  (Mostly, I think, he was fascinated by Marcus’ very shiny car.  No one in our town drove cars like that.)  I told him no, that my dad was in heaven and Marcus wasn’t my dad.  “Is he your uncle?  Uncle means he’s your mom’s brother.”  Well, I was only six or seven but I definitely knew my mom didn’t have any brothers, even though I called him Uncle Marcus sometimes.  But he wasn’t my uncle either.  “Marcus isn’t my dad or my uncle,” I explained, confused by his confusion.  “Marcus is my Marcus.”  

There wasn’t really any other way to describe it.  I had a full-time mother and a part-time Marcus and I didn’t understand why people thought that was strange.

Later, when we were in junior high and the details of the whole thing made more sense to us, Bellamy asked me why Marcus didn’t just move in with my mom, or why we didn’t move to New York to live in his fancy apartment.  But the idea of a full-time Marcus didn’t make any sense.  If he was here all the time, I explained, then we’d never get the excitement of looking forward to his visits, of watching down the street for the sight of his car turning down the end of the lane.  We’d never get the surprise of coming home from the grocery store to see him casually sitting on the porch, reading a book and waiting for us with bags of gifts from his concert tour in Germany.  If he lived there forever, every single day, then it wouldn’t be a big party every time we saw him.  When I was twelve, that logic made perfect sense.

I see things a little differently now.

For me, it was a party every time Marcus came to visit.  For Marcus, it was misery every time he had to get in his car and drive away.

Anyway, the New Year’s concert was when I think I first began to figure that out.  The first one, I mean.

I was like thirteen, I think, and Marcus was super famous by then.  I don’t quite know how it happened that everyone in the whole town sort of silently conspired to help mom keep her secret, but they did.  Maybe it was a little selfish – even before Marcus, this whole damn town has always just _hated_ tourists – but mostly, I think, it was because everyone here always loved Mom, and they knew what had happened and why she left the city and how unhappy she’d been, and for two whole months suddenly here was this man who made her happy.  It was such a dark time, and they were all so scared – the whole world was scared – and it was like this one tiny little glimmer of hope.  Indra (she’s the one who runs the diner on Main Street) said that to me once.  That was how she explained it.  She told me that people needed something good to hold onto, even if it was small, and that nice lady doctor who moved here with her little girl after her husband died has a new boyfriend who makes her smile, and that isn’t enough to make everything better but it’s at least someplace to start.

The town met Marcus Kane when he was nobody.  When he was just the tall guy in the flannel shirt who sat across the booth from us at Indra’s for Sunday breakfast and made my mom smile for the first time since any of them met her.  They fell in love with him because of that.  So it didn’t make a damn bit of difference to them that ten years later he was a rock star.  He was still the nice man in the flannel shirt, only now he was in magazines.

It meant a lot to my mother that the town helped protect her privacy – since _she_ really didn’t want to be in magazines – and you could tell it meant a lot to Marcus too, because he always gave back to the town.  He came to Mass with us once on Christmas and the priest said something about how they were raising money to repair the 18th-century church organ in the belfry; Marcus anonymously paid for the whole thing.  He’d come with my mom to buy things at auctions and bake sales for my school, and he had a weird love for the Harvest Festival, even though Bell and Octavia and I tried to explain to him how cheesy it was.  We could _not_ understand why he’d rather hang out at the dumb Harvest Festival than in New York.  But he loved that stuff.  He got famous so fast, you have to remember.  He was a rocket ship, shooting off into space, and anything resembling normalcy or sanity or regular human life got burned up in the blast and disappeared.  It was all flashbulbs and paparazzi and double-platinum this and Album of the Year that.  You can’t just walk down to the diner and eat a club sandwich and read your book in the corner booth in peace anymore, after that.  That whole part of your life is gone.

Except here, where the whole town let him keep it.  Here he was still that nice man who made Dr. Griffin laugh.

But every once in awhile, he was Marcus Kane too, and that was pretty special.

So like I said, I remember the New Year’s concert.  

It was the year of that crazy after-Christmas snowstorm, do you remember?  Marcus was booked to play at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, but all the bridges were closed down – rows of abandoned cars, people just got out and walked.  You couldn’t get in or out of the city.  It was crazy.  The snow was coming down in buckets.  The roads were _crazy,_ Mom wouldn’t let Marcus drive, and when they tried to send a helicopter for him the pilot said there was no way he was taking off in this weather.  So Marcus had to cancel.  They lied and said he was in the Midwest, visiting family, and Bruce did “The Woman That Fell From the Sky” in Marcus’ honor (it’s on YouTube if you haven’t seen it, which you should; he starts with a really funny joke about how he’s glad they couldn’t get a helicopter off the ground in this snow because otherwise he’d never have had the guts to cover that song with Marcus Kane standing right there.  People don’t know this, but Bruce can be hilarious when he wants to be.  He calls Mom Abracadabra, because he did it once and she told him never to do it again so now he does it all the time, like an obnoxious little brother.  Billy is funny too, but in a different way, like a crazy alcoholic uncle who has a different trophy wife every time you see him.  But they’re both dads with daughters, so they like me a lot, and they’ve both done “The Girl Inside the Mountain” in concert more than once.)

I got distracted by Bruce Springsteen and forgot what I was saying.  This is why I told Raven I didn’t want to do the book.  I _told_ her I’m not a writer.

Oh, the New Year’s concert. Right.

It had snowed the whole day, buckets and buckets like I said, and by the time it stopped around dinnertime it was up to your knees.  Nobody was driving, but fortunately this town is the size of a postage stamp and everybody walks everywhere.  We put on our boots and trudged down to Indra’s, which was jam-packed with people wrapping their hands around bowls of chili or mugs of coffee to warm themselves up.  Emori – she runs the record store on Main Street now, although back then she was in college and just working there part-time – was in there with some friends and Marcus heard her mention canceling the midnight concert in the town square.

“The what?” he asked, interrupting her conversation.

“I had some friends whose band was going to come play in the town square at midnight,” she said.  “But they’re snowed in and can’t get out of Boston.”

“It’s so shitty,” said her boyfriend John, sitting next to her.  “Like a hundred people bought tickets.  It was supposed to be a fundraiser to restore the historic marquee on the old Main Street movie theatre next door.”

“But we have to cancel it because we don’t have any musicians now,” said Emori in a glum voice.

“You have at least one,” said Marcus firmly, and they both stared at him.  “Go make sure everyone knows the concert is back on.”

That was my first Marcus Kane concert, as a matter of fact.  I went to dozens and dozens afterwards, but that was my first – Marcus in the gazebo at midnight, with whoever from the town Emori could scrounge up who could play anything at all, while we all stood in our snow boots eating cookies and drinking candy cane hot cocoa that Indra had hauled over in huge pots from the diner.  It wasn’t much, just like thirty or forty minutes of whatever covers the ragtag band could all agree on, which veered wildly all over the musical map; they did “Eleanor Rigby” and “You’re the Top” and “We Three Kings” and “Seasons of Love” from _Rent._  Emori was solid on bass and her friend Roan, who runs the hardware store, played drums in college and he’s still pretty good.  And David Miller from down the block even hauled his old electric keyboard out of the garage and dusted it off, and he wasn’t bad either.  But they’d had absolutely zero rehearsal, so the whole thing was just chaos; they’d get going and then David and Emori would catch themselves in completely different keys and they’d bust out laughing and have to start over.  

It was no Madison Square Garden, and David was no Billy Joel.  But it was still one of the best New Year’s Eves of my life.  Because Marcus Kane was already _Marcus Kane_ by then, he’d already sung for the President and had three world tours; and yet here he was, in a snow-covered gazebo in a tiny town the middle of nowhere in Massachusetts, standing up there with my mom’s friends and laughing like an idiot when he fucked up the capo chords, as though he was just a regular old person instead of last year’s Academy Award nominee for Best Original Song.  And no one had asked him to, no one had treated him like a celebrity or begged him for a favor; he’d just decided to do it.  

Marcus could have written a check and paid for the whole Main Street theatre remodel himself without breaking a sweat; but it was important to the town to do it themselves.  It was something that belonged to them.  So he bought tickets for him and me and mom and everyone in the band (“Is this the first time you’ve had to purchase a ticket to attend your own concert?” my mom had asked him, which made him laugh so hard he almost spit out his coffee) and then threw in another thousand dollars as a donation, but they raised all the rest of the money that night themselves because the whole town strapped on their boots and parkas to tromp down to the square to hear their very own private Marcus Kane concert.

He sang “The Woman That Fell From the Sky” for my mom, and I watched her, and I watched the town watch her.  None of us had ever seen her face before when she watched him sing, but all of us, including me, looked away.  It felt too personal, like we were intruding on something.  It was easier when they were up there cackling their way through “Let It Snow,” which felt like it was for everyone, like the whole town was in on a joke that was only for us.  I already knew, even then, that they would keep our secret.  You could feel them decide it right then and there.

And everybody did.

The second New Year’s concert you’ll remember because it was all over the news last winter.  We were in the city for the New Year visiting Marcus, who was playing a series of concerts at Madison Square Garden, but then of course the Snowpocalypse hit mid-morning on the 30th and the whole city just shut down.  They canceled the concerts and refunded everyone’s money, which was a moderate bummer for the Garden (don’t feel _too_ sorry for them, they have insurance for this kind of thing, it’s what that “acts of God” clause in contracts was made for); an enormous bummer for all the fans who paid top dollar for a sold-out New Year’s Eve Marcus Kane concert; a secret relief to my mother, who promised him she’d go despite how violently she hates crowds; and a massive, crushing disappointment to Marcus, who hadn’t told her he’d written her a new song he planned to debut onstage that night while he knew she’d be there watching.  

But it was no use; the trains were shut down, the streets were knee-deep in snow, and we couldn’t get out of Brooklyn.

Marcus lives – well, I’m not supposed to tell you where he lives, although I’m sure you can find it on the internet somewhere, but he lives in Brooklyn, in one of those big cool old warehouse-y kind of buildings that used to be a factory.  The whole building is just four giant condos, one at each corner, and I’m probably not supposed to tell you who has the other three but it’s important to the story, and it was all over the news anyway, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.  I’m so used to just instinctively trying to protect Mom’s privacy that I sometimes forget how easy it is, now that they’re married and everyone knows who we are, for everyone to find these things out anyway.  So, okay, one of the condos is an actor I won’t mention, he’s on the south side, and then next to him on the east side is a writer I won’t mention except that she’s _really cool_ , and the north side is Marcus, and then on the west side is another musician – Marcus’ good friend Regina Spektor.

So this is where it turns into some scene from a movie.  Marcus is scheduled to play this now snowed-out concert and has this song he wants to sing for my mom.  Regina throws a big New Year’s party every year and has paid nonrefundable deposits to rent tables and chairs and a white piano and outdoor space heaters and huge floral arrangements and one of those clear acrylic roof tents that’s made to look like crystal, with chandeliers on it and everything, and paid catering staff from the Italian restaurant right across the street for a crapload of food, but only maybe a dozen of her 300-ish guests are close enough (and willing) to walk there.

That’s how I ended up spending New Year’s Eve underneath a crystal tent surrounded by falling snow as Marcus Kane and Regina Spektor sang “Auld Lang Syne” at an impromptu rooftop concert/party for everyone in their whole neighborhood.

Seriously.  The whole neighborhood.  We all just walked around and knocked on doors.

Some of the guys from Regina’s studio band – her bass player and drummer, I think? They’re brothers – live a few streets away, and they trucked over with their gear on a dolly and brought some friends, and we just went through all the buildings up and down the street, we went into the Irish pub on the corner and drafted all the dads in there drinking beer and watching the Bulls game, and we rallied all the hardy Brooklynites braving the weather around the corner at the dog park.  There was no private security except Marcus’ regular guy and Regina’s regular guy, who both live in the adjoining building, so the whole thing was a liability hazard like you wouldn’t believe.  We spent like two hours tromping around Brooklyn in our snow boots, rounding up families with kids and groups of snowed-in college students down to their last pack of ramen and elderly Eastern European couples who didn’t speak English, and inviting them all to an impromptu rooftop feast of roast chicken, butternut squash gnocchi, and like twelve cases of champagne.  There were trays of passed appetizers but no waiters to pass them, so people just spread out in little clusters around the rooftop and just grabbed a tray.  If you got tired of crab cakes and you wanted a mushroom tartlet, you had to get up from your little corner of the rooftop and wander around until you found a cluster of people whose tray had mushroom tartlets on it.  

Mom was sitting at a table in the corner drinking champagne with the catering staff, who she had insisted stay and join them as guests instead of trooping back out into the snow and walking home without dinner.  She’s always more comfortable at parties with people who work for Marcus than with people he’s friends with; I think she still sometimes looks at people like Regina Spektor and wonders if they’re looking at her and wondering what Marcus Kane sees in this woman (they’re not, usually; and Regina _definitely_ isn’t, she’s really nice).  But drinking champagne with the catering staff, or having lunch with Marcus’ personal assistant, or sending Christmas gifts to his driver and housekeeper in the city, all of that she can do no problem.

Anyway, so we’re all up on this rooftop, with a bunch of heaters and a tent and our coats on, so it’s really not that cold at all, and some of the kids at the party have noticed that there’s kind of a crowd gathering in the street down below (somebody tweeted something, I’m sure) and they’re tossing cookies from the cookie trays down to them in little napkin parachutes.  Meanwhile the rest of us are stuffing our faces with these beautiful miniature almond cakes with edible gold leaf on top, drinking all the coffee the caterers brought, and taking turns running up and down the stairs from Regina’s apartment for more. 

And we’re looking out at the lights of New York City and watching the snow fall down, and then suddenly Regina goes over and sits down at the piano and looks at Marcus, and they do that silent-communication thing musicians always seem to do with each other where whole reams of information gets passed back and forth with just raised eyebrows and head nods.  So Marcus, who I hadn’t even noticed until then had brought his guitar with him, and stashed it in a corner, pulls it out of the case and goes to stand behind her, and they proceed to play for … God, it must have been an hour and a half, at least.  They stood up there in front of a hundred and fifty Brooklyn residents aged 3 months to 95 years old and they sang and sang and sang.  They did _her_ greatest hits and _his_ greatest hits, including “The Girl Inside the Mountain” in my honor, and a whole slew of covers (I know the one that got the most YouTube hits was “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” but I don’t know why everyone’s sleeping on “Galileo”; they cracked into those Indigo Girls harmonies like they’d been doing it their whole lives.  Poor, poor Raven, snowed in uptown and missing the whole thing.  God, she was cranky about that.)

By then it was close to midnight, so they took a break so we could refill everyone’s champagne and gather around the piano and everyone sang “Auld Lang Syne” together – not just Marcus and Regina, but the old Cuban grandmas and the little kids and the drunk college students and the Italian waiters and the Bulls fans from the Irish pub and the drummer and the bass player and my mom and me.  We counted down to midnight and yelled “Happy New Year!” and clinked our glasses together and banged on the giant steel catering trays and then we all stood around Regina Spektor’s white piano in the snow with Manhattan in the distance across that big black river, and we sang.

Things like that just _happen,_ when you’re with Marcus Kane.  Extraordinary, beautiful things.  I don’t know how he does it.  I always wondered, when I was a kid, if there was something about him that might, just a little bit, be magic.  And we know better, my mom and me, to take those moments for granted.

I think that was my favorite part, all of us standing together and singing.  It was the kind of New York moment you only see in movies, the kind of thing you think never happens in real life.  And every once in awhile I like to pretend like I’m the kind of person who lives in that world, who hangs out on rooftops in Brooklyn with famous people, instead of being a small-town medical student who drives a twelve-year-old brown station wagon.

But my mom’s favorite part was what came after, and honestly I can’t blame her because it was pretty great.

Before the crowd could disperse, before anyone could make their way to the door like the party was over, Marcus called for everyone’s attention.  “I was supposed to play this song for the first time tonight,” he said, looking at my mom, “and come hell or high water, I will.”

Regina stayed on the piano, but laying back, very light, just a soft little kind of bubbling harmony underneath the guitar line so she didn’t pull focus.  And the snow stopped, just for a few minutes – I swear to God, just stopped falling completely the moment his fingers touched the strings again.  (Magic, just like I said.)  And there was this kind of hush, just guitar and soft piano, and the snow all around us muffling all the usual New York street noises, and then he began to sing.

Well, I mean, I don’t need to tell you.  It was called “Start Over” and it went platinum and of course it was his first new song for my mom that everyone _knew_ was for my mom since they’d gotten married, so of course it’s been analyzed to death by every music critic in the whole world and Raven has a whole chapter of this book dedicated just to unpacking the lyrics and how the imagery of New Year’s Eve is like a metaphor for this new stage of their relationship, which she can explain better than I can.  And like I said, I’m not a music critic.  I’m just a person.  So I can’t say anything smart about the song from a music point of view like Raven.  It’s a really good song, but that’s not why I love it.

I love it because I remember looking up and catching a glimpse of my mom, watching Marcus while he was singing, and she was so happy it almost hurt to look at her.  She was standing there, in her jeans and boots and sweater with her giant parka and no makeup and snow in her hair, with the lights of New York City behind her, and Marcus Kane was standing ten feet away from her with his guitar and they were looking at us like there was no one else in the room, and suddenly I knew that this must have been what it was like the very first time. That first night, at that shitty dive bar, when Dad dragged Mom to come see his old friend Marcus play, and he fell in love with that girl at the table in the front row before he even knew her name.  I looked at him looking at her and I knew, even though I hadn’t been there, even though I wasn’t even born, that it must have been just the same.

Poor Marcus.  Poor Mom.  Poor Dad.  What a mess, for all of them.  They were all so good and they loved each other so much and everybody wanted to do the right thing, but really, if you think too hard about it, the whole thing will break your heart.

So it’s good and bad, you see.  And I don’t know how to reconcile it.  I mean this other life I never had where my mom and dad grew old together, and this life I have now where the snow stops falling from the sky so Marcus Kane can sing to my mother.  One life’s not better or worse than the other, not really, it’s just that only one of them’s real.  And the one I got is a really good one.  The one where I don’t have a dad, but I have a Marcus.

All of us would trade anything to have my dad back, of course, but at the same time, if he was, then Marcus and Mom wouldn’t be together.  He’d never have written any of that music.  So many things would be different.  Not just our lives, but other people’s, too.  People we’ve never met.  Marcus gets letters sometimes, awful beautiful ones, from people who say his music pulled them out of a depression or kept them from self-harm.  People who fell in love to his music, had their first kiss to his music, danced at their weddings to his music.  It’s such a little thing, when you look at it on paper – a song, I mean.  Just a few pages of lines covered in words and shapes.  Just three or four minutes and then it’s over.  But it can change everything.  A song can change a person’s whole life.  “The Girl Inside the Mountain” changed mine – changed all of ours, really, since without it nobody would ever have figured out who we were.  So maybe wherever it is that we land is where we were always supposed to end up, even if it’s nothing like what we thought it would be.

I’m not sure how to explain it any better than that.

But like I said.  I’m not a writer.


	4. Tumblr Ask Box Q&A

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Misc. short-answer prompts about the fic, my writing process, the Marcus Kane soundtrack, and assorted headcanons . . . plus all ten album covers!

****

_**I just have one quick question with the woman who fell from the sky au . . . I just wanted to know if Abby changed her last name when she married Marcus. She kept griffin when Jake died so I was wondering if she changed it.** _

 

She keeps Jake’s last name because Clarke does.  She loves Marcus, but Clarke will always be her primary loyalty and she would never want to not have the same last name as her daughter.

* * *

_**What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?** _

 

The voice in this one is distinct from all the others I’ve written, because it’s first-person from the point of view of Raven, who is a journalist, telling this story from the outside.  I’ve only ever written one other first-person fic, _The Seventh Heiress,_ which is from Kane’s point of view (and Bellamy’s, briefly) recounting events they actually witnessed.  But with Raven, I wanted it to feel like she was a real journalist, which means she can only know what people actually tell her.  Which means there’s always another story inside the story, since both Marcus and Abby are really private people.  She can’t get all the way inside their relationship, she’s an outside observer.  That’s a tricky thing to pull off as a narrative device and I don’t know if I’d try it again in any other context; it’s very much specific to this fic and this world, for me. 

Something else that’s a little different about this one in comparison to some of my other modern AUs - another thing that I wasn’t actually sure if it was going to work or not but became really important to the story and I think makes it feel really special and personal to me - is how it sort of accidentally became about 9/11.  That wasn’t part of my initial vision for the story at all.  But I wanted to set it in present day which meant I had to back-date everything based on how old Clarke would be and then I realized, shit, this puts Jake dying and Abby running away from the city like a year before 9/11, which meant it suddenly felt like something that I really needed to include because it was so important to me that they were all dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers.  And I know a lot of people who were living in New York then who have talked about how going through that experience changed or shifted things in their lives in ways that impacted career choices, relationships, and all kinds of other life decisions.  So it suddenly felt like it made all the sense in the world for Marcus to turn on his TV, see what was happening on the news, and just instinctively without even thinking about it to throw some shit in an overnight bag and drive to Abby as fast as he could.

I definitely would never have thought I would write a fanfic with 9/11 as a major plot point, but now I can’t imagine their story without it.

* * *

_**What’s your favorite line of narration?** _

 

> _“It isn’t just the words. It was never just the words.  It’s that lilt in the music, that heartbeat pulse, that freshness and color.  She’s not just in the stories, she’s inside the music too._
> 
> _It’s the most extraordinary musical tribute of adoration I’ve ever encountered in my life._
> 
> _I sit in my hotel room, listening to Marcus Kane for hours as the sky turns from blue to rose to violet and then darkens around me, and I suddenly find myself wondering about Jake Griffin - and how the last two decades of rock music might have been altered forever if he had lived._
> 
> _I already know I will not say this to Abigail.”_

* * *

__

_**Where did the title come from?** _

 One of the first things I did with this fic, while the story was coalescing in my head, was make a list of song titles.  I actually tried to write lyrics for a couple before deciding that I liked it better to leave nearly all of that in the reader’s imagination.  But I had a very clear general sense of a couple of the more important ones; I don’t know what the lyrics for “The Eden Tree” are, for example, but I can hear it in my head.  I always knew that I wanted the launching point of the fic to be a song he wrote for Clarke, so “The Girl Inside the Mountain,” and the idea of her as a princess trapped underground and trying to escape was the first one that I came up with, and that one was almost the title.  But then I was thinking about, okay, if Clarke is the girl in the mountain, what’s Abby? And then I realized she’s the woman that fell from the sky.  And it fit so well both with canon and also with the way he thinks of her as this sort of miraculous gift he didn’t deserve.  And it was from there that I really went with the idea that Kane only writes about her in those kind of abstract terms, and there’s this obsession that builds up around guessing who she really is.  That really came from the idea of the name … that she’s “The Woman,” she’s this almost allegorical-sounding person, and thus fans immediately begin arguing with each other about whether she’s real.And so that really shaped the story because it became about the choices they make over years and years to let Abby hang onto some semblance of a normal life and what happens when that privacy is taken away from her, and also the ways that she is and isn’t who Raven thought she would be.  It’s also kind of Raven’s journey to find the story of this elusive person who inspired all her favorite songs and realizing she’s a real human being. _ **  
**_

* * *

_**Were there any alternate versions of this fic?** _

No, this one I think I had pretty solidly mapped out when I started, although initially I think I might only have intended it to have one or two parts and it ended up longer.  I considered - but ultimately ended up discarding - the idea of a companion piece that actually was from Kane’s point of view.  But I think it works better as it is, where all you know is what Raven knows and there are things that don’t ever get made explicit.  It makes Kane and Abby’s relationship feel like it has some mystery to it, like it’s something the public will never fully understand.  I liked the idea of letting them keep a little bit of their privacy.  _**  
**_

* * *

  **Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from reading this fic?  
**

My hope would be that people would come away from this fic doing what I do, which is basically listening to any and all music by male singer-songwriters and mentally placing it in the Marcus Kane canon.  “Okay, so this one would be from the album where he’s pining after Abby in New York … “

****Also, if you love someone, you should tell them.  I think the moral of this story is that the whole world can come crashing down around you at any moment and if you love someone and they love you, you should stop wasting time because we never really know how long we have. _ **  
**_

* * *

**I had a thought. While rereading all your the woman who fell from the sky au headcanons. I was thinking about what sort of voice I imagine Marcus having. I sort of see him as like a male adele. Is that weird. Like sort of adele with a touch of a bit more country. Like a guitar playing male adele. Just a thought. Anyway did you have anyone in mind when you were writing him?**

I’M SO EXCITED TO BE ASKED THIS QUESTION YOU HAVE NO IDEA

I HAVE A WHOLE PLAYLIST

I HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THIS SO MUCH

Male Adele is a perfectly good direction to go, if that works for you.  In my head it’s a little more gravelly and rough, somewhere in the Mark Knopfler/Tom Waits/Leonard Cohen vein, although I also drew a lot on Deacon Claybourne from _Nashville_ so you’re spot-on with there being maybe just a touch of country in there.  I kind of think that too. I think on stage he’s got the whole sexy-in-jeans-and-a-t-shirt Springsteen thing going on, but with a voice that’s a little lower and raspier.

Okay so get ready for a whole musical headcanon with YouTube links I’M SO EXCITED ARE YOU READY I’M READY LET’S GO

[Here’s Marcus rehearsing for one of his many SNL appearances, singing a song he wrote for Abby about how much they both miss Jake.  ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyAF0UQ4cmk)

[Here’s a song Marcus wrote about the first time he met Abby and realizing he was in love with her at first sight.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7i2GXHjYXQ)

[Here’s one he wrote for Clarke about sitting up at night in the backyard and looking at the stars together and talking about Jake.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTXmseLoJh4)

[Here’s one about how much he hates going back to New York every time he has to leave Abby behind.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuKfiH0Scao)

[Here’s another song he wrote about Abby and realizing he was falling in love with her.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtLVXBqfqBY)

[Here’s a song he wrote later in life, looking back at all the ways that Abby and Clarke have healed him.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOS8xKeLsj0)

[Here’s a song he wrote for Clarke about how he would always love her and be there for her.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aYxMuLb3h8)

[Here’s one he wrote after he and Abby got married about how grateful he is for the life he has now.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiKlmCrShDU)

[If the last headcanon wasn’t enough Marcus Kane/New York feels for you, here’s Marcus performing at a 9/11 benefit.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi_Tm_g6KdA)

[Bonus track - this musician is an IRL friend of mine and this is exactly the kind of bluesy, Gospel-y song I think Marcus would cover on one of his albums or come sing at his mom’s church.  I LOVE THIS SONG SO MUCH (and I have a little crush on Ike okay sorry not sorry)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6vfg1KqjLM)

**FULL PLAYLIST**

“You’re Missing,” Bruce Springsteen  
“Are We In Trouble Now,” Mark Knopfler  
“Constellations,” Jack Johnson  
“Ain’t No Sunshine,” Bill Withers  
“I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You,” Tom Waits  
“Come Healing,” Leonard Cohen  
“Have a Little Faith In Me,” John Hiatt  
“A Life That’s Good,” Charles Esten (from _Nashville_ )  
“My City of Ruins,” Bruce Springsteen  
“Crooked Soul,” Ike Ndolo


	5. FICLET: What Happens Next

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **PROMPT: What happened after Abby Griffin became officially "The Woman"? 1. did they move in together (straight away/at all)? 2. did Marcus propose or did they just agree on getting married? 3. you said Abby was miserable for a long time, how did that affect their relationship?**

##  **MAY**

The story breaks on Jasper’s blog and everything goes to shit.

Abby’s whole town is under siege.  Patients can’t get through to make appointments because her voicemail is full of interview requests and calls from Kane fans (her office phone number, of course, is publicly listed on the hospital website).  There are paparazzi outside the hospital, parked on her lawn, piled by the dozens into the town’s few small B&Bs and hotels.  Meanwhile, Clarke can’t set one foot outside her dorm room without being bombarded by kids with iPhones.  She comes home early from school and takes all her second-semester finals online.

The breaking point is a dumb little thing, the way breaking points always begin as dumb little things.  After a month of flashbulbs popping in her face, of being forced to hire security guards, of uncomfortable meetings with Human Resources at the hospital where she can tell they’re trying to get her to take a leave of absence to put a stop to the tabloid photographers invading the building and disrupting their patients to try and get a shot of Abby at work, the thing that finally makes her snap is the coffee.

The coffee in the hospital cafeteria isn’t bad.  And it’s cheap, and it’s right there, so it’s where Abby always goes.  She likes Gina the barista, who is young and bubbly and chatty and doesn’t have that strange subdued energy that the non-medical staff of hospitals sometimes have (when they’re not terrifyingly artificially cheerful).  Abby braves the mob of cameras outside the staff entrance and makes her way down to the cafeteria, and sees some strange young man she’s never met before standing behind the counter.  Gina quit last night, he tells Abby when she asks.  Two big burly paparazzi followed her home, into her apartment building even, all the way up to her door - she couldn’t shake them - pestering her for details on any personal conversations she’d ever had with Abby Griffin.  Had she ever mentioned Marcus Kane? Did she say she was seeing someone? Does she wear a ring? What’s her morning coffee order? (They’ve got a social psychologist ready to go with a “What Your Latte Says About You” sidebar featurette to run alongside one of the hundreds of photos they’ve snapped of Abby talking to Gina, since the cafeteria is technically open to the public and the hospital hasn’t legally been able to keep them out for long.) 

The new guy makes Abby a latte but uses almond instead of vanilla and it tastes burned.  She throws it away as soon as she’s out of sight and goes across the street to the local diner.  There are no reporters here, because they - like everyone in the town - find Indra mildly terrifying and not to be fucked with, so inside it’s quiet and still half-empty.  “On the house,” says Indra with no expression on her face, which from Indra is the equivalent of a tearful affectionate embrace, so Abby thanks her gratefully and tips the whole cost of the drink anyway.  She turns to go and almost collides with her bitchy neighbor Diana Sydney, who has been sending passive-aggressive little emails three or four times a week about the TV crews parked on her lawn, as though Abby somehow controls them.  As though Abby _could_ just ask them to leave, simple as that, but for some reason has chosen not to.  (“Would be great if they could be gone by this weekend, thanks!”)  Diana is on her way out and passes in front of Abby with a mocking little quip about the things some women will do to get their face on the cover of _People_ Magazine, and then sails out the door.

Abby, horrifyingly, bursts into tears.  She can’t stop.  Everyone’s staring at her.  She’s known everyone in this diner for nearly two decades, she’s operated on at least three of them, she’s handed out trick-or-treat candy to their children and grandchildren, and now they’re all watching her stand in the middle of the diner sobbing as though her heart is about to break because she can’t do this anymore.

“Take the leave of absence, Abby,” is all Indra says.  “And talk to Marcus.”

Abby is startled.  She has not, in fact, talked to Marcus since the story broke and the chaos began, but nobody except for Clarke (who wouldn’t tell Indra) knows that.  They all know he hasn’t come back to town, but they have no way of knowing Abby hasn’t called him, either.  She can’t.  She can’t do it.  Because she can’t lie to him, she’s never been able to lie to him, so she won’t be able to pretend that she’s all right.  She won’t be able to convince him she isn’t miserable.  And then he’ll be devastated at the knowledge of how bad things really are, he’ll be consumed by guilt, he’ll believe it’s his fault, and everything will only get worse.  Because she knows him well enough to know that’s exactly the reason he hasn’t called her.  He’s afraid she thinks he’s ruined her life.  He’s afraid she never wants to see him again.  And while he’s wrong about that part, he’s not wrong that she’s miserable, and she doesn’t know how to protect him from that.

But none of this, of course, explains how _Indra_ knows this.

“Because he called here,” says Indra matter-of-factly.  “Three or four times.”

Abby stares.

“Me too,” says Roan, who owns the hardware store, who’s sitting at the counter eating bacon and eggs.  “Like once a week.”  He’s sitting next to Emori, who runs the used record store on Main Street that is Marcus’ favorite hangout when he’s in town (Emori saves him rare Dylan B-sides when she finds them and she tells him to his face which of his songs she doesn’t like.  He adores her.  If he goes to the grocery store alone without supervision he’ll come home three hours later with all the ice cream melted because Emori was at a massive estate sale in Detroit three weeks ago and “ABBY YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE THE MOTOWN SELECTION SHE BROUGHT BACK”), and she nods in agreement.  So does Nyko, the chiropractor Marcus saw the last time he was in town after he was having back trouble, and at least four others sitting in the booths along the wall.  Marcus has been calling all over town.  He’s asking after Abby, in his own way, but he’s also apologizing.  Have the reporters caused property damage, he wants to know.  Can he cover the cost of repairs, of lost wages for the days they had to close up shop.  He never meant for this to happen, he hates that he’s done this to them, he wants to know how to make it up.  It was such a peaceful, private place, and they’ve all been so kind, and he’s afraid he’s ruined everything.

Indra says they all told him the same two things: that it wasn’t his fault, and to call Abby.

But he didn’t, and she didn’t, because nobody knew what to say.

“Talk to Marcus,” says Indra again firmly, and so finally, that night, she does.

* * *

##  **JUNE**

The same publicist who came out the first time, three months ago when Clarke first told them about Jasper’s blog, comes back to give Clarke and Abby a crash course in media relations, which basically comes down to the idea that Abby should just pick a reporter from a respectable news outlet, give away the exclusive story rights on her own terms, and then most of the furor - “Most,” cautions Maya, “not all” - will die down.  So Abby picks Raven Reyes from _Vanity Fair,_ who drives out the following weekend with a photographer.  They’ll be the cover story of the September issue.

Once the news is out that they’ve been scooped, the reputable press all leave.  But nobody can get rid of the tabloids.  They settle in, like a plague, and Abby can’t escape them.

They’re talking again, almost every day, but Marcus won’t come back.  He can’t go anywhere without being besieged either, and the minute his car was spotted on the turnpike there would be news choppers overhead and an army of camera crews speeding down the freeway to beat him there and get the first shots of Marcus and “The Woman” reunited.  He can’t do that to her.

So instead they talk, and cry, and miss each other, and Abby begins to wonder if it will be like this for the rest of her life.

* * *

##  **AUGUST**

Raven’s editor sends them a draft of the story to read in.  Marcus - still in New York - gets a copy.  So does Thelonious, and so do Clarke and Abby.  Abby feels like everyone can see her naked.  She doesn’t want Thelonious reading this.  She doesn’t want Clarke reading this.  She doesn’t want her parents reading this.  None of it’s inappropriate, none of it’s _bad,_ it’s just that it’s _hers_ , and it was never her idea to share it.  And now it’s going to be dissected and discussed by strangers all over the world.

They’re going to be talking about her, and they’re going to be talking about Marcus, but worst of all, they’re going to be talking about Jake.

She braces herself, and sits down on the back porch with her iced tea to read it.

Raven did a good job, considering.  Abby doesn’t hate it.  But it’s strange, reading about herself.  It’s just a story to Raven, but it’s Abby’s real life.

But Raven saw one thing Abby didn’t.  Raven’s sharp musical ear, her keen critical appreciation of every detail of every song in Marcus Kane’s entire catalogue, has unerringly led her to something about Marcus that Abby never knew.

Abby never saw herself in the music.

Abby had no idea.

She calls Marcus.  “Is she right?” is all she says, and he doesn’t have to ask her what she means.

“Yes,” he tells her, and there’s something like admiration in his voice.  Raven Reyes was the first person besides Marcus who hears what he can hear.  Raven heard Abby inside the music.

“Come back,” says Abby.  “I don’t care about the cameras, I don’t care about the news vans.  It’s been too long. Please.  Please, come back.”

Four hours later, he’s there at the doorstep, in her arms.

* * *

##  **SEPTEMBER**

Clarke goes back to school, starting a few weeks late by arrangement with her advisors to avoid being on campus when the copy of _Vanity Fair_ with her mother’s name on the cover hit newsstands - accompanied, over Marcus Kane’s strong objections, with the concurrent release of his new album, _Dear Abigail._

He’d been working on it quietly since Clarke’s story broke, without telling anyone.  Even Abby didn’t know until it was finished.  There was a new, raw acoustic version of “The Girl Inside the Mountain,” which made Raven Reyes cry when she popped the CD Kane sent her into her stereo when she got home, and a sweet hopeful ballad called “The Way Out of the Dark” that she could feel in her bones was going to be a hit.  He sent a demo to Raven, as a way of perhaps answering her questions without answering them, but had no intention of releasing the album until next year.  It was meant to be a gift, he told Thelonious over and over.  A gift for Abby.  

“Perfect,” says Thelonious, who rushes it into production so it can drop the same week as Raven’s article.

Marcus is furious, refuses to do any press or public appearances, but the album sells like gangbusters anyway.  It makes him $2 million in the first week.

He donates every penny to Abby’s town.  If none of the local business owners will take his money as compensation for the reckless camera trucks backing over their lawns and blocking their driveways, he can at least reimburse the town for police overtime and make sure the square is restored in time for the Harvest Festival.

Abby loves the album.  She doesn’t care that Thelonious got greedy and released it early to make a buck.  All she cares about is the sound of his voice singing the song he wrote for her baby girl, and how much he loves the Harvest Festival, and the way that Raven Reyes has opened her eyes and ears and she can hear it now, too, she can hear herself in the music, she can feel his love for her in every note.  For months she doesn’t listen to anything else.  When Marcus comes back to town (he comes for a few weeks in September, and then again in October) he catches her humming bits and pieces of it around the house.  When he goes back to his condo in New York, it all feels too quiet without Abby in the kitchen, washing dishes and singing.

* * *

##  **NOVEMBER**

Clarke comes home for Thanksgiving with a van full of friends.  They did this last year too, when Clarke was a freshman; anyone who lived too far away to drive home was invited to pile in and come stay with the Griffins.  Abby hated the thought of college students eating Thanksgiving dinner in the dorms alone because they couldn’t afford a plane ticket back to Austin or Twin Cities or Salt Lake.  This year, Clarke was more strict; she didn’t want anyone tagging along that she didn’t trust around Marcus.  So it’s only eight this time - her roommate Octavia and Octavia’s brother Bellamy, who came last year too; Jasper Jordan, who is terrified that Marcus Kane wants to sue him or punch him or something and who Clarke has brought along to try and get him to chill; Jasper’s roommate Monty; Bellamy’s friend Zoe and her girlfriend Harper; and Clarke’s friend Miller (who also came last year) with his boyfriend Bryan, who just transferred from another school and who Abby hasn’t met.  They roll in Wednesday afternoon and immediately run off to the Harvest Festival, which none of the city kids can quite believe is real.  Marcus and Abby give them a two-hour head start in the corn maze so they can enjoy their last remnants of private time in the house all weekend. 

Clarke’s bedroom is downstairs, so they’ve gotten comfortable over the years having very, very good sex very, very quietly (she very nearly walked in on them a few times when she was small and it left them both slightly traumatized and paranoid), but Abby likes to make noise, and Marcus likes it when she does.  And a crisp autumn sun is shining and they have nine kids in the house they’ve temporarily adopted for the next five days and Abby is turning over all the cooking to Marcus which is exactly how he likes it and they’ll spend the evening strolling hand-in-hand through the corn maze with big paper cups of spiced cider into which Indra - manning the cider station - will discreetly slip a hearty pour of bourbon, and then tomorrow it will be Thanksgiving and he’ll be spending it with Clarke and Abby as though they’re just an ordinary family, and the thought of all these things sends a wave of happiness rushing through Marcus Kane that leaves him dizzy, only to recede in a moment when he realizes it will all be over on Monday when he goes back to New York.

He pushes the thought out of his head, burying his mouth in Abby’s throat as he rises and falls inside her, as she gasps his name, and suddenly they’re both coming, hard, clutching each other like shipwreck survivors, and Marcus decides Monday can wait.

It’s at dinner the next night when the thing happens.

Clarke’s friends, who tromped home from the Harvest Festival at one in the morning with a huge ruckus, prompting Abby to privately dub them all “the delinquents,” are crowded around the dining room table.  Marcus, exhausted but happy after a long day of cooking, is at the head of the table, poised to carve the turkey, with Abby at the other end next to Clarke.  Abby asks Marcus if he’d like to say grace, so he sets down the carving knife and startles them all into awestruck silence by singing the Doxology:

_“Praise God from whom all blessings flow_  
Praise him, all creatures here below  
Praise him above, ye heavenly host  
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost”

It’s such a simple melody and he sings it without adornment, but it makes Abby start to cry.  Marcus is more religious than she is, his mother is tremendously devout (but in the best way) but it always does something to her when she hears him singing in her house.  Not a CD, not the radio, but the real him, that real rich dark throaty voice, singing for the kids and for her.

She wants to say something but can’t think of any words, so she does the next best thing and passes the buck to Clarke.  “Let’s all go around the table,” she announces, “and say one thing we’re grateful for.”  And if she starts with Clarke, she herself will get to go last, and maybe that will buy her some time to put this thing happening inside her into words that Marcus will understand.

“Me first?” asks Clarke, and Abby nods.  “I’m grateful for Marcus,” Clarke says, and the whole room stops moving. 

Marcus stares at her, and for one agonizing moment Abby realizes he thinks Clarke is mocking him.  He looks like he’s been slapped in the face. 

“I know things have been kind of shitty,” Clarke goes on, “and it’s not anybody’s fault, it’s just, like. You know.  A shitty situation.  But maybe it will be good, in the long run,” she says, smiling at Marcus with a hopeful light in her blue eyes which is how he suddenly, startlingly realizes that she means it.  “Maybe it will be good that you don’t have to hide anymore.  And you won’t have to be gone so long next time.” 

Abby’s eyes spill over first, Marcus a close second.

“Don’t get all weepy,” Clarke tells him, embarrassed.  “I just meant I like it when you’re here.  It’s hard on Mom when you’re gone too long and I like it when she’s happy.”  Marcus doesn’t say anything.

“Do we _all_ have to make Marcus Kane cry, or … “

“Shut up, Jasper,” she whispers, kicking him under the table.

Octavia leans over to her brother.  “How long before we can acknowledge that this just got really awkward?”

“Shut up,” he says through a polite smile, and they all stare tactfully down at their forks.  Bryan is supposed to go next, he’s seated beside Clarke, but he’s entirely at a loss about whether he’s actually supposed to say something or not, but he’s saved from humiliating himself completely with a feeble “…. I am grateful for this nice weather we’re having” by the completely insane thing Marcus does next.

“Marry me,” he says to Abby, and everyone stops breathing to stare.

It’s silent for a long, long, long time before Abby manages to say, in a very small voice, “ … what?”

“I don’t have a ring,” he says, carving knife forgotten as he comes around the other side of the table.  “I don’t have a plan. But I’ve wanted you to be my wife since the first moment I saw your face in that bar with Jake and this is so stupid, being apart is _stupid_ , I _hate_ it, I can write from anywhere, I can go into the city for work if I have to but I don’t want to live there anymore.  I don’t want to go home, Abby,” he says to her, taking her hands in his.  “I want _this_.  I want you.  I don’t care about anything else.”

(The eight college students crammed in around the table next to Clarke all love their friend a lot and they don’t want to be dicks about this but they’re literally witnessing rock and roll history right now and everyone is silently wondering which of them is stealthy enough to capture any of this on video.  It turns out to be Miller, but Clarke catches him later trying to upload it to YouTube and throws his iPhone into the creek.)

“What do you want, Abby?” he asks her, his hands tight around hers, and she looks up at him with tears shining in her eyes and murmurs “Don’t go back to New York.”

“Is that a yes?” he asks her, hardly daring to believe it, and she laughs, tears streaming down her face.

“That’s a yes,” she says, and pulls his face down to kiss him (politely; there are children present).

Marcus turns to Clarke, a question in his eyes, but he doesn’t even have time to open his mouth and speak before she’s in his arms.  “I vote yes too, by the way,” she says as he kisses the top of her head, and while to this day Bellamy insists that Octavia is exaggerating about how _much_ he actually cried, even he has to admit that he wasn’t _not_ crying.

“And I,” says Zoe, who is absolutely fucking starving, “am thankful for yams,” which redirects everyone back to the business at hand and prompts an apologetic Marcus to return to carving the turkey so they can finally eat.

The sun shines all weekend, crisp and cold and clear.  Marcus agrees to brave the Black Friday sale at Target with the girls - something Abby refuses to do - while the boys earn their keep hauling all the Christmas decorations down from the attic and stringing up the outdoor lights.  They treat the whole group to pancakes at Indra’s diner on Sunday morning before sending them back on their way.  They spend the next few hours cleaning, slowly converting the house back to normal, and their evening having  wild, decadent, thank-God-the-kids-are-finally-out-of-the-house sex.  It already feels like being married, Marcus thinks.  It already feels like he’s a parent.  It already feels like this is exactly the way everything was meant to be.

On Monday morning he calls his assistant and within two weeks his things are moved, his condo has been sold, and for the first time in his entire life his permanent address is no longer in New York City.  He works out a deal with Thelonious where he drives into Manhattan once a month for meetings, and he still records in their studio.  He plays gigs all over town, too.  But he doesn’t live there anymore.  He always comes home at the end of the day to Abby.  He doesn’t want to live anywhere that isn’t right here, with her, ever again.


End file.
